- Thus, his article sought to criticize Judaism as a religion, and not as an ethnicity.
Calling Jews "pitiful and miserable", accusing them of drunkeness, gluttony, licentiousness, blaming them of Jesus' crucifixion, telling demons dwell in the souls of Jews etc. does not count imo for criticzing religion only.
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I disagree on this point, for the simple reason that if you ever read radical Protestant polemics against Roman Catholics or indeed, us, similiar comments are made.
For example, in 2009, the Calvinist para-denomination 9Marks, which infests the OPC, PCA and SBC, and various non-denom churches, and is led by Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, published on their blog a vile article entitled "Putting contextualization in its place." The goal was to explain to reformed missionaries in Dubai et cetera how to relate to local Muslims and convert them.
It stressed in particular that the Reformed evangelists had to make it clear they were a different religion from the "image-worshipping, pornography-viewing, sexually promiscuous Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox drunks who had oppressed them [the Muslims] for centuries."
For that matter, if you read the Panarion of St. Epiphanius of Salamis, similiarly abrasive language is used for the followers of specific religions.
But this is not racism; it is polemical religious criticism. Regarding the Jewish religion only, and not the ethnically Jewish people, furthermore, I believe St. John Chrysostom was correct in calling it a "pitiful and miserable" faith associated with gluttony and drunkenness, and the Orthodox do exorcize all baptized converts from other faiths, so strictly speaking one could argue from our liturgy that all non-Christians are potentially demon-posessed. I believe he erred only in accusing the practitioners of Judaism of deicide, because they were not present at Golgotha, and the Roman authorities had shared guilt for permitting it; Pontius Pilate cynically allowed the Sanhedrin to use his own soldiers to kill a man he knew was innocent in order to avoid an insurrection.
Now. regarding gluttony and drunkenness: it is a fact that Rabinnical Jewish fasting is not as extreme as Orthodox fasting, with only Yom Kippur being on a par with Good Friday or in Oriental Orthodoxy, the Fast of Nineveh. There were no sustained periods of extended duration fasting in the Jewish faith. There is the annoyance of kosher, but for anyone who, like me, has discovered the joys of Eastern European Jewish deli food as is available in Los Angeles at places like Canter's, this is a non-issue.
In terms of alcohol consumption, Chassidic Jews have a practice wherein a substantial amount of wine is consumed, enough to produce euphoria, as a means of celebrating divine loving-kindness. I believe this is a continuation of older related Jewish practices, which are reflected even in the Psalms and the Eucharist, albeit after the destruction of the Temple, the Pharisees went from condemning heavy wine consumption to favouring it.
Lastly, Judaism is as a religion, pitiful and miserable; the Jewish religion became one of mourning after the destruction of the Temple. This is why Jewish liturgical music, although beautiful (I particularly like the choir of the Moscow Choral Synagogue, and the Karaites), is, except in the Chassidic tradition, sombre and mournful; Jewish brides ceremonially break a glass or crystal cup at their wedding in a ritual that was originally intended to express grief for the destruction of the Temple.
Also, strictly speaking, all religions other than Christianity, and indeed the heterodox forms of Christianity like Lutheranism, are to varying degrees pathetic and miserable. Lutherans suffer the misery of being deprived sacraments like annointing with holy order; although their beliefs on the Eucharist are more or less correct, their priests probably cant consecrate it, although whether or not their communion is real is not something I could say for sure, owing to the mercy of God.
The important thing to remember is that St. John Chrysostom was using the word "Jew" the same way he might have used the word "Greek," that is, to refer to the Judaic religion or the Pagan religion. He was not speaking of ethnic Jews who had converted to Christianity, whereas Luther's polemic, by including vile depictions of Jews with stereotypical semitic features like the hook nose, obviously was. St. John Chrysostom was in fact addressing his Antiochene congregation which consisted largely of ethnically Hebrew Christians, descended from the Jews who converted to Christianity and who indeed at that time continued to convert.
The Jewish rabbis of fourth century Antioch understandably wanted to recover the members of their faith who had embraced what they believed was a polytheist idolatrous heresy, in particular the women, because Judaism is matrilineal, and it was the women of his congregation that were being lured to attend Jewish services.
So basically, what we have is a bishop who himself was very possibly, I daresay probably, of partial Hebrew ethnicity (a huge number, perhaos even all, Antiochene Christians are, because many still preserve Jewish names like Zakka, and furthermore, both the Syriac Orthodox and the Melkite amd Antiochians were during Turkokratia largely endogamous, meaning those descended from Greeks at one time or another doubtless married Jews, Arabs and native Aramaic speakers of Syria, Turkey and Mesopotamia), duking it out with Rabbis who themselves were probably partially ethnically Greek or Syrian, over control of a flock the Rabbis considered to be apostates from Judaism who were otherwise ethnically members of Israel; St. John for his part clearly wanted to put pressure on the Jewish adherents who had not converted to convert, by luring them back into Christianity via the women whose conversion to Judaism they had sought.
So, two religions in a battle for control of one ethnic group.
Unlike Luther, who was not Jewish, not related to the Jews, and who viewed them as racially inferior presumably based on degradations resulting from their supposed deicide. Luther very possibly subscribed to the common fallacy that nearly all Jews rejected Jesus, something we can see is false on the basis of the mission of St. Thomas the Apostle, which largely targeted existing Jewish communities in the Orient (I have no doubt the Nasranis of India are almost without exception descended in part from the once thriving community of Kochin Jews, also in Kerala), and the conversion of most Jews in Ethiopia, a predominantly Jewish state, to Christianity, in the fourth century.
Based on the prevalence of Jewish last names in the churches of Antioch, Assyria, Jerusalem and even Alexandria, I would guess the conversion ratio to have been upwards of 33%. After all, St. Peter is described as the evangelist of the "circumcision," with only St. Paul specifically targeting Gentiles, and the epistles of St. Peter, John, Jude, James, and whoever wrote Hebrews must have had a clear audience in mind.
I do not believe any polemics of the Antiochene church targeting Judaism should be taken as anti-Semitic, given the Semitic nature of the Antiochene church, nor should any polemics of the early Church regarding Jews be viewed as racist until the rise of Islam, which created a situation wherein the Jewish and Christian
millets became self-contained, endogamous ethnarchies with their own legal systems, which as a rule avoided comtact with each other (in part because relations between different Dhimmis were subject to Sharia, in which Dhimmis were always at a disadvantage).
On the other hand, as stated before, the illustrations of Luther's scatalogical book clearly identify ethnic Jews, even those who had embraced Christianity, as the target; a common belief in Western Europe at the time was that Sephardic Jewish conversos were lying and continued to practice Judaism in secret, and much of the Spanish Inquisition focused on the convert community. One would simply have to read the title or see the illustrations of Luther's book to get the impression he was implying the Jewish Christians were all lying practitioners of Judaism in secret, who in their secret rituals desecrated the Eucharist and murdered Gentile Christian boys.
